This past week, I attended 2 conferences: All Things Open, local to me, and A11yTO, unfortunately unlocal, in Toronto, Canada. It was a hectic week, especially because I was speaking at A11yTO!
All Things Open (ATO)
All Things Open is a local-ish conference for me, 30 minutes away in Raleigh. I’ve been going every year for quite a few years. The past 3 years, I’ve also bought tickets for my team. ATO started in 2012; I missed the first few years, but I’ve been regularly attending since at least 2016 (other than 2020, of course).
The organizer, Todd Lewis, is genuinely a great guy, with a deep and sincere commitment to community. The conference itself is usually pretty solid, with good speakers and a lot of choice. I don’t always like all the keynotes, which are mostly dominated by sponsors, but there’s usually some keynotes that are worth watching; I know they try for a balance. Some of the keynotes have been spectacular.
As an aside, for a couple of years, some of the sponsors were in sketchy industries like blockchain, cryptocurrency, or “Web 3”, but they content of the most of the normal presentations was sandboxed into tracks, so you could avoid the scam artists. I don’t begrudge the organizers getting money where they could, and Todd was receptive when I voiced my concern. Luckily, that wave seems to have passed, and the sponsors this year and last were more AI companies; AI has its own problematic ethics and practices, but at least it actually does add value and do something interesting, rather than all the Ponzi-scheme crypto nonsense.
The conference is very well attended (around 5,000 people at its pre-Covid peak, I think), and has a dozen or so tracks. The talks are normally of good-to-great quality, and there’s a refreshing emphasis on open source. I wish there were more sessions on accessibility, but that’s normally concentrated in a pre-conference set of sessions the day before; on the one hand, that’s nice to have, on the other hand, it’s a bit ghettoized, and that limits the exposure.
Unfortunately, this year, I wasn’t able to attend as much as before, because I had a partial conflict with the Launch Chapel Hill accelerator we’ve been participating in. So, I missed the second half of the first day.
There was less diversity of topics this year, I felt… too many AI presentations, from beginner to advanced. I know it’s a huge, industry-changing topic, but it’s not the only thing worth talking about. Nevertheless, my favorite presentation was an AI talk, Is Your LLM Lying to You? Ensuring Factual Accuracy with GraphRAG and Knowledge Graphs by Nyah Macklin. It didn’t go deeply into how to detect or mediate LLM errors, but it was an excellent overview of GraphRAG, which I found useful, and Nyah was a dynamic and knowledgeable presenter.
My teammate Simon Varey and I also got to grab lunch with Robert Gove, a dataviz engineer at CrowdStrike, and his colleague Michael Head, a UI engineer. Robert gave my favorite talk at ATO last year… while wearing a conference T-shirt from OpenViz Conf 2013, the conference where I gave my first accessible dataviz talk! I asked him about it after his talk, and it turns out he wore it because he actually knew who I was, and had seen me at ATO the year before… and had seen my talk at OpenViz Conf!
Robert and I each proposed talks for ATO this year (my first time proposing a talk), but neither of our talks were accepted. I was bummed at the time, but relieved this week when I didn’t have to give 2 talks in 1 week. Maybe next year!
Takeaway for All Things Open
I do recommend ATO, especially if you get their generous early-bird tickets. It’s great value for the money, and worth your time and attention. It’s very topical, and is a good bellwether of the current trends in the industry.
A11yTO
A11yTO (or Accessibility Toronto) is a great conference, and quite the contrast from the much larger ATO. The day after ATO, I flew up to Toronto, and was on stage the next day.
A11yTO punches well above its weight. Though it’s more modest in size, a few hundred people, it feels like one of the top accessibility conferences, in terms quality of organization, quality of speakers, reputation, and social impact. I’d personally put it up there with CSUN, Axe-con, AccessU, and Accessing Higher Ground.
It’s a single-track conference, a format I personally prefer. As a regular non-keynote speaker, even though the number of overall attendees is much smaller, the size of your audience is pretty much guaranteed to be much larger. And better yet, it means that the attendees all have a shared experience of the event, leading to richer and broader conversations. Plus, no FOMO.
I spoke there once before, in 2018, and I was honored to have my talk accepted again this year. I presented on accessible dataviz, of course, and specifically the choices and features we implemented in ParaCharts, as an illustration. Wanting to avoid the talk being a sales pitch, I erred, perhaps, on the side of being informative… so much so that an attendee who worked at a bank asked afterward if the software was available for other organizations to use.
Though I was nervous, and not as prepared as I’d have liked (yes, I did finish my slides at least 5 minutes before I went on), my talk was well-received. Many attendees thanked me for my talk, and a few even said if was their favorite of the event. Two experienced speakers I know, and who have seen me present before, independently said it was the clearest and most coherent talk they’d seen me deliver. I do tend to ramble… so that was high praise, coming from them.
I also enjoyed the event as an attendee. Most of the presenters were excellent, seasoned professionals. A few of the speakers were clearly less experienced, but all of them had great and important material.
In terms of delivery, I felt the strongest talk of the conference was the final one, It is designed to break your heart by the incomparable Eric Bailey. A raw, crucial talk about a harm-reducing mindset.
I was still in the mild post-presentation mental fog, so my cognitive load capacity only let information trickIe in; there were several other great talks, but here’s a few of the others that resonated with me:
- Ally Keys: A hardware tool for Mobile Keyboard Accessibility by Quintin Balsdon was a cool talk about a clever development and testing tool, a physical dongle he brought to hand out.
- Tiny CSS, Big Impact by Mike Mai had beautiful slides and his approach appealed to my minimalist instincts, with just enough technical content that I could absorb some new CSS.
- Culture eats Technology for Breakfast by Stewart Hay was a very business-oriented take on “selling” accessibility, which spoke to some of the recent lessons I’ve learned in the accelerators we’ve been participating in.
I definitely made some good contacts and maybe lit a few potential customer fuses.
A11yTO respects presenters
It bears stating an extraordinary policy of A11yTO: they not only give speakers a free ticket to the event, but they pay for the hotel and flights. AccessU similarly treats their speakers well. I wish other conferences respected their speakers that way. Yes, speaking is a good exposure, but as the artists say, you can die from exposure. Many other accessibility conferences only give you a modest discount on the admission fee, and no help on flights or accomodations, when the reality is that the speakers are the content of the conference.
Takeaway for A11yTO
I strongly recommend attending A11yTO. I saw many other accessibility professionals there who I hold in deep regard, who attended not as speakers, but because they like the conference; that says something. I hope to attend next year, finances and schedule permitting!